SAP HANA

SAP is likely the largest computer software house in the world today. SAP is famous for its Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software, used by most of the largest companies throughout the world.

SAP’s ERP system allows businesses to store just about all the information they need to function, from data related to customers, to purchase orders, to deliveries, to invoices, through to production schedules for factories, stock levels, and so on. SAP’s main selling point is the real-time, integrated aspect of the system—if an incoming delivery is entered into the system, then the stock levels are updated in real time. Data is always fresh, always current.

SAP Business Information Warehouse (BIW), its vision of a data warehouse solution for the SAP ERP system. This product has gone through several different versions, right up to the SAP Business Warehouse (BW) 7.3 version, the latest at the time of writing.

The SAP BW (Business Warehouse—the term used to describe the underlying technology, as opposed to Business Intelligence, used to describe the user-facing technologies) system allows users to report on the data stored in the ERP system, allowing anything from simple analysis to complex simulations on sales forecasts depending on different factors.

The BW system usually does not use the same exact database machine as the ERP system—data is moved from the ERP to the BW machine for reporting. This is done so as not to impact the data entry (vital) functions with someone wanting a report on last year’s sales (which is less important). Hence, the data in BW (and in data warehouses in general) is not always up-to-date. Data loads are generally done once per day, introducing a slight delay in data freshness.

There r two different principal functions of SAP’s software, as follows:

*** SAP ERP stores data in a database
**** SAP BW takes the data in the database, aggregates it, and presents totals and trends to the user.

As we can see, the two systems will produce different loads on the system, in terms of the SQL used by the applications to “talk” to the database. The first will essentially be INSERT and
UPDATE instructions, whereas the second will almost exclusively generate SELECT statements.

SAP HANA architecture:

The two main parts of the SAP HANA server system are the hardware and the software. On the client side, SAP provides the SAP HANA Studio which allows application modeling. For data reporting on a SAP HANA system, SAP’s BusinessObjects software can connect natively to SAP HANA, and reporting can be done in any other program that can create and consume MDX queries (such as Microsoft Excel pivot tables), which SAP HANA supports natively.

I will not go into any detail regarding the reporting software on top of SAP HANA, except to show simple Excel integration—the topic of reporting is too vast subject, i’m still learning. My main focus here on installation Hana, that’s it.

Before installation let we know the hardware:

The SAP HANA box itself is a massively multi-core, multi-CPU server, with a great deal of memory—up to several terabytes. IBM announced that in collaboration with SAP, they had built a machine with 100 TB of main memory, yes you are correct 100TB. At the time, SAP indicated that this machine would be sufficient to run the eight largest clients of SAP ERP—all at the same time! Yes, correct 100tb, see below unit.

One of the main strong points of SAP HANA is its ability to process data in parallel, cutting the initial (large) amount of data into small chunks, and then giving each chunk to a separate CPU
to work on—hence the need for the large number of CPU cores.

One other aspect of the system is that wherever possible, data is kept in memory, in order to speed up access time. Where a traditional database system might set aside a gb or two of memory as a cache, SAP HANA takes this to the next level, using nearly all the server’s memory for the data, making access times nearly instantaneous.

The database software powering SAP HANA is what’s known as a column-based RDBMS, and is
a logical evolution of the following three existing technologies that were already in use at SAP:

*** TREX: SAP’s search engine, a component of SAP NetWeaver since 14 years. TREX already included in-memory and columnar store attributes, which were designed to improve
performance by searching data already in main memory, and already in highly optimized data structures.

*** MaxDB: SAP’s own RDBMS technology. MaxDB is a very capable, relatively simple (when compared to some other big players such as Oracle) RDBMS system. It is capable
of running the SAP ERP or SAP BW, despite having very low system requirements and a fairly shallow learning curve. MaxDB brought in the persistence (that is, what happens
when the power goes off—a crucial question for an in-memory system) and backup layers to SAP HANA.

*** P*Time: A lightweight, OLTP in-memory RDBMS system, acquired by SAP in 2005 when they bought Transact in Memory. P*Time provided the in-memory backbone
to the SAP HANA software. It is worth noting that P*Time is a traditional row-based, not column-based, data store. By combining these three proven technologies, SAP has managed to produce a coherent, persistent in-memory database system, known internally as NewDB (which says a lot about
how the technology is viewed from inside SAP). Download (tutorials, and articles also) Hana Developer

SAP Hana Installation:

Here is 5 easy steps, you can install the SAP HANA Studio and set it up on your system. Installation of the SAP HANA server is done by qualified technicians for certified hardware vendors—you cannot download the database software and install it on your server yourself. Only clientside installation this.

1 – What do I need?
Before you install the SAP HANA Studio on your computer, you will need to check if you have all of the required elements, listed as follows:

*** A minimum free disk space of 190 MB. The objects you create in SAP HANA will be stored on the server; they will not take any space on your machine (unless you export them).

*** A recommended memory of 1 GB. SAP HANA Studio is built upon the Eclipse IDE, which is written in Java. The more memory you have on your machine, the smoother the Studio will run.

*** JAVA JRE 1.6 or 1.7. This needs to be installed and configured correctly or the SAP HANA Studio installer will fail. Additionally, if you have a 32-bit OS, you’ll need a 32-bit Java, and a 64-bit Java for a 64-bit OS.

*** A SAP HANA server to connect to, you will need the server name or IP address, and the instance number. You should ask for this information from you client/system administrator. You will also need to make sure that the Studio can connect to the server on the port 3<instance_id>15 (for example, if the instance ID is 40, the port 34015 needs to be reachable). Check with your network administrator for this.

2 – Downloading the SAP HANA Studio The easiest way to get hold of the SAP HANA Studio installation package is to use the SAP HANA DVD set; the Studio is available there.

If the DVD is not available, then you can use the SAP Service Marketplace Software Download Center link check here to download the Studio. You will need a
SAP Service Marketplace login to download the software. Additionally, your SAP Service
Marketplace login needs to have a current SAP HANA installation active, register your self.

A last alternative to download the Studio is to use SDN. A developer version of the studio is available at the following URL: Note: you need to register and have sdn profile and it’s free.

3 – Installing the SAP HANA Studio
Installation of the Studio is straightforward. On Windows, just run the hdbsetup.exe program in
the installation folder, Installation Parameters Installation parameters are a fundamental aspect of the SAP HANA lifecycle management tools hdblcm andhdblcmgui, and provide the opportunity to optimize and customize the system during installation.

Installation parameters are used for all methods of parameter specification – interactively, as command line options, or with the configuration file. The following information is relevant for either installation mode (interactive mode or batch mode).

Just follow the instructions. The only information that you’ll need to provide is the destination folder for the installation, and you can usually leave the default value.

The program will be installed, and you will have a Start menu item created for you.

4 – Your first look at the SAP HANA Studio The first time you run the Studio after installation, you are presented with a clean, empty interface:

The four options available are as follows:

*** Open Administration Console: This option allows you to administrate the SAP HANA appliance itself; for example, creating users and assigning authorizations

*** Open Modeler: This is where you will do all your SAP HANA development work, creating views on data, running SQL queries, and so on—we’ll be spending the best
part of this book using the Open Modeler option

*** Open Lifecycle Management: Allows you to update the SAP HANA installation on the server, by applying patches you have received from SAP

*** Documentation Overview: This is a link to the SAP HANA online documentation pages on the sap.com website Choose the Open Modeler option to get to the main development layout (referred to as a perspective), with which you will do most of your work in SAP HANA; the main development layout.

The main areas (panes) of the Modeler perspective are explained as follows:

*** The Navigator pane: Shows the SAP HANA systems you’ve configured, as well as the list of objects (notably, tables and views) available to you on those systems.

*** The Quick Launch pane: As its name suggests, a quick way to get to the creation screen of different object types.

The Where-Used List pane: Readers familiar with SAP will have already come across this concept, which is widely used in the SAP ERP. This pane will show, for the object
selected in the Navigator, where the object is used (if, for example, an attribute view is used in several analytical views, the analytical views will be listed here).

*** The Cheat Sheets pane: Depending on the context (the action you’re currently performing), this pane will show you different options. In the previous screenshot,
we are at the main page, not performing any particular action, so this pane shows us the option to add a new SAP HANA server.

*** The Properties pane: Lists, and allows modification of, the properties of the object currently being modified.

*** The Job Log, History, and Progress pane: Whenever you perform creation or modification actions in SAP HANA, your changes need to be activated before being
usable in the database (again, a common notion in the SAP ERP world). Since activation can take a little while (especially if you choose to use a cascaded activation,
which will activate an object and then attempt activation of all dependent objects), and can potentially fail (for example, in the case of syntax errors), these panes will
show you the status of your current action.

SAP HANA Studio, which you can enable or disable according to your preference. The layout too is totally customizable and can be customized to suit your
particular needs. Feel free to play with the Studio layout to find a layout that works for you. If you find that you have “lost” a pane, or have made a complete mess of the layout and want to
undo your changes, then go to Window * Reset Perspective; this will return you to the default layout any time.

5 – Configuring the Studio
Before you can do any work with the Studio, you need to connect it to your SAP HANA server. From the main Administration Console or Modeler perspective, right-click inside
the Navigator pane, and from the menu that appears select Add System, which will open the following dialog window:

You’ll need to give the hostname and instance number of your SAP HANA installation, as well as a short description (especially useful if you have several instances configured). You can also
specify the Locale (default language) setting of your installation, and can create folders to better arrange your different SAP HANA servers. Once that’s done, click Next -> after which the login dialog window will open ..

Here you are asked for your login credentials on the SAP HANA server. Ask your system administrator for this information—you might need to specify your User Name and Password,
or your SAP HANA server might be configured to accept your operating system user (Single Sign-On).

You can create several entries to the same SAP HANA instance if you need to do so, for example, if you have two different sets of login credentials—an everyday user for development work, and
a system administration account to create other users or perform administration tasks. If you need to do this, then the Add to Folder and Description fields can come in useful to help tell
the difference.